


i will lift you up (the air in your lungs)

by openended



Series: Olivia Shepard [14]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Growing Up, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-07
Updated: 2014-11-07
Packaged: 2018-02-24 10:55:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2579000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>thanks, Mom.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	i will lift you up (the air in your lungs)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for N7 Day 2014, and stars my Olivia Shepard (Colonist/War Hero, whose mother survived Mindoir with her)

_"Get Olivia out of here, I'll find Mark."_

_"Charles."  They don't have time for arguments. The weather sirens start to wail, even though what's coming their way through the storm isn't natural and is far worse than a tornado._

_"I'll be fine, Hannah. We'll meet you at the barn. Go!"_

_She hesitates for one second longer, and squeezes his hand before letting go. She turns and grabs her daughter, staring in shocked horror at the dark sky, and runs._

Hannah blinks in the bright sun and wishes she'd brought sunglasses. She doesn't even own a pair anymore, but there were plenty of gift shops at the spaceport where she could've bought an overpriced pair and not have to squint all afternoon. Hindsight.

She shades her eyes and scans through the program again, printed on actual cardstock. She has six others just like it, framed in her apartment. The Alliance doesn't give out certificates for this, it's the closest she can get. 

The list of names near the end gets shorter every year as they advance, and this year has only two beside Olivia's. She wonders what happened to the others, what became of the nineteen who started with the three so that they aren't here today. Better not to ask. She's stopped asking a lot of questions ever since Olivia came home after her N4s and didn't talk for a week.

Her omnitool beeps and she sets the program on the empty seat beside her and brings up her messages. A selfie of Olivia, making a face at the dress uniform she's required to wear, followed by  _please don't make me wear this to dinner_. Hannah laughs and sends back a response ( _I promise_ ). 

The seats around her start to fill in, two, three, five, even eight a time. She squares her shoulders. The sun's bright but warm, and her daughter's about to be awarded the most elusive rank in the Alliance. She tucks her hair behind her ear and tries to think about things other than the fact that Olivia only needed to reserve one seat, instead of three.

* * *

_She's soaked to the bone and covered in mud, and autumn's in the air. Yesterday she loved that slight chill, jeans tucked into boots and her hands stuffed into her hoodie's pockets as she and her friends laughed on their way back from the football game._

_Today she's freezing and scared and exhausted. Her foot's finally stopped bleeding, but it's starting to throb, and she can't tell if she's crying or it's raining again. She's stopped trying to keep her teeth from chattering as she tucks herself into an even tighter ball for warmth that isn't there. Her mom's hand on her back isn't full of the heat she needs, but it's warmer than she is without it, and she immediately curls into her mother's embrace._

_She liked the cornfield a lot better when she was hiding from stupid boyfriends or her brother or her parents, when it was her refuge from essays she failed again and money they didn't have and races she screwed up._

_She used to lie on her back between the rows, close her eyes and just let everything drift away into the dirt and the air. But if she closes her eyes now, she might miss a shadow that means they need to run again._

Olivia shakes the hand of the eleventh admiral in a row whose name she's forgotten and finally spies an inconspicuous exit. She'll probably upset somebody who couldn't personally congratulate the Hero of Elysium (and  _god_ but she wishes that title would die already) on making N7, but that seems secondary to finding her mother.

Hannah's easy to spot in a crowd, tall with red hair obstinately refusing to turn grey, and Olivia sighs in relief when she sees her talking to Hackett.

If Hannah didn't insist on being at every single event where Olivia stood up and accepted something, no matter how unimportant, Olivia wouldn't invite her, especially not since Elysium and those articles that dug up her background and Mindoir for everyone to know about. Standing next to a crowd of families who've all read the same magazines, it's all too easy to see that her mother isn't supposed to be at these things alone.

But Hannah insists and so she passes along dates and times and does everything she can to find her as soon as the ceremony's over.

Hackett excuses himself with a nod and then Olivia beams up at her mom. The whole ceremony - the whole process, really - was wrapped up in how hard ICT is and that N7s are the absolute best of the absolute best that she hasn't had a chance to revel in the sheer  _excitement_ of being an N7. She can finally wear that sweatshirt Liara sent her last year.

"I'm so proud of you," Hannah says as she hugs Olivia tight.

Olivia's glad that Hannah insists on being here for these things. It'd be a hollow victory if she didn't have even one person to celebrate with. She returns the hug, tighter. "Thanks, Mom."

* * *

_"Come back alive, kid." Ritual, tradition, habit, whatever you want to call it - it's theirs._

_Olivia grins. "I always do."_

_Only this time she doesn't, and Hannah's woken up to Anderson knocking on her door at 2:42am._

It's been two years and the only thing Hannah's figured out is that she doesn't like being alone in the universe.

She's put filters on all her news feeds, blocking any mention of Olivia Shepard. She used to simply collapse those stories, hide them behind a notification of "this story was blocked for containing the phrase:  _Olivia Shepard_ ; click to view content" but temptation invariably kicked in at three in the morning. She'd expand the article anyway and her heart would ache more than even after Mindoir, so much so that more than once she couldn't breathe and needed to take one of the pills Karin Chakwas slipped her at Olivia's memorial service. 

Now she just hides those articles entirely, doesn't even see a hint of them while catching up on her feeds over breakfast.

Liara calls sometimes, less frequently now than in the beginning. Hannah knows she's on Illium and sends her a care package when she's feeling particularly lonely; she always gets a vidcall shortly after the package arrives, and Liara's thanks are genuine but distracted.

Wrex calls regularly, fulfilling a promise, and she looks forward to every other Tuesday after the bakery closes for the night. She's more aware of Tuchanka news than she is of the current Citadel election cycle.

She hasn't heard from Garrus since he left for Omega, and hopes he at least told someone else he was going. She worries about him. He handled Olivia's death almost worse than she did.

Tali's back with the Flotilla and the Alliance reassigned Ashley and Joker as soon as they could.

Hannah keeps track of everyone as best she can, but she's only mother to Olivia. Was.

The doorbell rings and she grits her teeth. She's on every Do Not Call and Do Not Knock list the Citadel has to offer, but there's always one energetic volunteer getting high school credit for campaign work and doesn't read the list.

* * *

_"How's your mom?"_

_Olivia stills. The paintbrush drops a dot of purple onto the black of her gauntlet and it slowly drips onto the floor. "Uhm."_

_Garrus looks up from his own armor. "You haven't talked to her yet?" The disbelief in his voice could fill the entire battery._

_She gives him a little shake of her head and blinks rapidly. "No." She sets the brush down and wipes away the stray purple. Seeing and talking to her mom has been the thing she's wanted most since waking up in Lazarus Station's medbay, and it's been the one thing she hasn't let herself get._

_"Shepard." The same tone that got her out of the tent on particularly cold mornings when they had to spend the night on some planet Hackett told her to investigate._

_"What if she doesn't..." she swallows the panic she's been carrying since she found a video of her memorial service on the extranet. Watching that had been a supremely bad idea. "What if she doesn't think it's me, what if I'm not..."_

_He cuts her off before she can continue. "Shepard." Softer this time, kinder. He lays his palm on her thigh and she starts to breathe evenly again._

Garrus drives her there, but opts to stay by the skycar once she convinces him that she's going to ring the doorbell and not just hitch a rapid transit cab back to the _Normandy_ the second she's out of sight.

Her handprint still lets her in the building and doesn't set off any alarms. She walks up the two flights of stairs and can't bring herself to just walk into the apartment. Touching her finger to the doorbell, she feels even stranger than if she'd opened the door herself.

"I've told you people before, I..." the admonishment dies on Hannah's lips as she opens the door. She blinks once, twice, three times, and then looks away, scrunching her eyes tight before looking back. "Olivia?"

Olivia bites her lower lip in a failed attempt at keeping tears at bay. "Hi, Mom."

She's immediately wrapped in a warm, tight, hug, and she'll have to endure a week of Garrus'  _I told you so_ because she doesn't know how she ever thought her own mother wouldn't believe her. It's worth it.

"I  _died_ , Mom," the words come out unbidden when they finally make it to the couch. She rubs at her cheeks.

Hannah wipes her own tears away. "I know. And I have some questions about that," they both laugh, half-caught between their tears, "but later." She pulls Olivia in for another hug, and Olivia's perfectly content to stay here for a few hours.

* * *

_"I'm joining the Alliance."_

_Hannah blinks. She'd expected dinner to be in silence, like every night this week, and the week before. "What?"_

_Olivia spears a green bean. "They'll pay for school. In full."_

_"Do you want to maybe think about this first?"_

_"I have. For a long time, and I...Mom, I can go anywhere in the galaxy I want and they'll pay for a full master's, maybe even a doctorate. And I talked to Baria's recruiter at the job fair, and they told me about this New Frontiers program that they just started and is hugely successful, and they have a twenty-year plan because there's so much space we haven't explored and mapped yet, and I can do this."_

_Hannah rubs at her eyes, processing everything that's just happened. "Why is this the first time I'm hearing about this?"_

_Her fork clatters to her plate. "You know what, nevermind. I don't know why I expected any actual feeling out of you." She shoves away from the table and stands up._

_"Olivia!" Hannah protests, an apology and a plea to stay all in one._

_She stops at the door and turns around. "I just," she sniffs and looks up at the ceiling, "I told you about this a month ago." A shadow crosses her face; she clenches her jaw and shakes her head slightly. "No," she whispers to herself._

_Hannah feels like she dodged a bullet. Olivia's words can cut deep when she wants them to._

_"I miss them too. But I somehow manage to pay attention when you talk." Defeated, with drooped shoulders, she walks out of the kitchen._

She hasn't felt rain in years. She freezes the minute they step off the shuttle into a steady drizzle.  _Breathe, Hannah. It's just rain_. She misses the _Orizaba_ already, even if she did feel out of place on a warship.

Zaeed stops two steps ahead, turns around and comes back for her. He opens his mouth, probably to make a joke about needing to find her planet legs again, but changes his mind and takes her hand instead. She gratefully laces her fingers with his and takes a step forward into the rain.

He knows about Mindoir but he's never asked, not even when she wakes up, half-drenched in sweat, eyes crazed and unfocused, not even when she leaves the room sometimes if there's a storm in the vid they're watching. Hannah supposes that the man who was shot point blank in the eye by his partner would know a thing or two about demons that shouldn't be let out.

"She's okay," he says as they're led past the burned skeletons of buildings, and squeezes her hand tighter.

The words sound like the platitudes they are, even more so for coming from Zaeed, but Hannah hopes he's right. She barely survived losing her daughter once.

It stops raining three weeks later, the afternoon Jack and Zaeed find Olivia buried in the rubble. Bruised, battered, and broken, but breathing.

As soon as she's allowed in the room, Hannah doesn't leave. Zaeed, Jack, and Wrex keep a rotating guard outside.

* * *

_They've been living in almost complete silence for the two weeks that follow their fourth argument about joining the Alliance, the one that ended with a plate smashed against the floor and Olivia leaving the apartment for the night. She almost pretends not to hear the soft knock on her door. But the knock is progress, even if it probably heralds only a reminder to pick up milk on the way home from school tomorrow._

_She moves the Dante aside and opens up her calculus homework. "Come in."_

_Hannah stands in the doorway, silhouetted by the hallway light. She stands in silence for a moment, as if needing to work herself up to speaking. "I'm sorry. I should have listened."_

_Olivia trips over the speech she has prepared. In lieu of the milk reminder, she'd expected yet another lecture on maternal worry and what eight years of active military duty means. Her mother gestures to the spot beside her on the bed and she nods and scoots over._

_Hannah sits down. "You're my kid, so I'm always going to worry. But...is this really what you want, Liv?"_

_Olivia nods emphatically. She doesn't know what changed her mother's mind, but she's never been so sure of anything. "Yes."_

_She exhales slowly and leans her head against the wall. "Your father would kill me for saying this, but okay. Let me know if I need to sign anything."_

Everything hurts. Her eyeballs hurt, her hair hurts, her toes hurt, _everything_. Her left leg doesn't hurt too bad, but it itches like she washed it in poison ivy.

Her other senses focus slower. She's woken up in enough hospitals to recognize the smell and sounds around her. And if she's in a hospital, then...

She has to swallow a few times before her voice comes out, hoarse and quiet. "Mom?"

There's a shuffling noise beside her. She tries to open her eyes, but they're taped shut, though she can see light through her eyelids.

A hand curls softly around hers. "I'm right here."


End file.
